Hot Wheels Infinite Rush (PC) Review

There is something immediately satisfying about launching a tiny Hot Wheels car into a loop at ridiculous speed, hitting the boost and watching it fly through the air before landing perfectly on the other side.

That basic sensation is still very much alive in HOT WHEELS Infinite Rush. Developed by Milestone, the studio behind Hot Wheels Unleashed and Hot Wheels Unleashed 2: Turbocharged, Infinite Rush takes the series in a significantly different direction. Instead of concentrating almost entirely on purpose-built tracks, it opens the doors to four large, freely explorable Hot Wheels environments.

And for the most part, it works.

The catch is that the move to an open world isn’t always an improvement.

Infinite Rush drops you into a toy-scale world where the orange track is no longer the entire playground. There are four islands to explore, each with its own look and collection of activities, races, secrets and collectibles.

The idea sounds simple, but it changes the rhythm of the game considerably.

Rather than selecting one race after another from a menu, you’re driving around the world, discovering events and deciding what you want to tackle next. There are races, stunts, exploration activities, collectibles and rival challenges scattered around the environments.

It creates the feeling of actually playing with a giant Hot Wheels set rather than simply competing on a series of tracks.

The four islands also provide plenty of visual variety, from urban environments and roads to more unusual Hot Wheels-inspired settings. There are enormous track pieces, loops, jumps and toy-like structures everywhere.

But this is also where I started missing Unleashed.

One of the greatest tricks pulled off by the Unleashed games was making ordinary environments feel enormous.

You were a tiny die-cast car racing across bedrooms, garages and other familiar locations. A kitchen table suddenly became a racetrack. A chair leg became an obstacle. The contrast between the tiny car and the enormous real-world environment was a huge part of the appeal.

Infinite Rush removes much of that contrast.

Everything is now designed around the Hot Wheels world itself. That certainly makes the environments more spectacular, but it also makes them feel less surprising.

I enjoyed exploring the islands, but I occasionally found myself thinking that the game would have been even more effective if it had retained more of that “tiny toy in a giant real world” feeling.

Thankfully, Milestone has not messed around with the most important part: the driving.

Infinite Rush is an arcade racer through and through. Cars are fast, responsive and deliberately forgiving, and throwing them around corners is tremendously satisfying.

The game introduces four vehicle classes:

• Versatile – balanced all-rounders
• Speeder – built around outright speed
• Drifter – designed around sliding through corners
• Titan – heavier vehicles that bring a different approach to driving

With more than 150 vehicles available, the garage becomes one of the game’s biggest attractions.

And this isn’t simply a case of having 150 cars that all feel identical. Changing vehicle class can noticeably alter how you approach an event.

A Speeder makes sense when you’re chasing outright velocity, while a Drifter becomes much more useful when you’re dealing with corners and technical sections. Titans provide their own strengths, while Versatiles are the dependable option when you don’t want to specialise.

It gives the collection a genuine purpose beyond simply filling a garage.

Infinite Rush gives the open-world structure a central objective: each island has its own Rush Master.

You work through events, build up your progress and eventually get the opportunity to take on the island’s ultimate opponent. Beat the Rush Master and you claim their car and title.

It’s a simple progression system, but it gives the otherwise free-form exploration some direction.

The problem is that some of the activities scattered around the islands can feel disconnected from that main progression. You can spend quite a while exploring, collecting things or completing side activities without necessarily feeling like you’re getting much closer to your next major objective.

That’s not necessarily a problem if you enjoy wandering around and treating the game as a toybox. If you’re someone who likes a clearly defined campaign path, however, the structure can occasionally feel a little loose.

The car collection is obviously a major part of the experience, but there is also vehicle customisation, including performance perks and visual changes.

Then there’s the Track Builder.

This is one of the most ambitious additions to Infinite Rush. Rather than simply racing on tracks supplied by Milestone, you can construct your own layouts within the game’s environments, placing track sections around the world and creating your own challenges.

It’s the feature that most closely captures the spirit of physically playing with Hot Wheels.

Whether you actually spend hours building tracks will depend heavily on how much of a creator you are. For me, it was more of a welcome bonus than the reason to keep playing, but the potential is enormous.

The game supports both local split-screen play for up to four players and online multiplayer, with cross-play supported between compatible platforms.

And this is probably where Infinite Rush makes the most sense as a social game.

Hot Wheels has always been about messing around, finding ridiculous jumps and seeing what happens when you put stupidly fast little cars on ridiculous tracks. You don’t necessarily need a deep racing simulation when four people are throwing brightly coloured toys around the same environment.

It’s accessible enough for less experienced players while still providing enough speed and chaos to keep racing fans interested.

The further I got into Infinite Rush, the more I noticed the limitations of the open-world formula.

The initial excitement of discovering each island is strong. Finding a new activity, stumbling across a collectible or suddenly launching yourself onto a massive piece of track is fun.

But eventually the novelty starts to wear off.

Some activities begin to feel like variations on the same basic idea, and the open environments can sometimes feel larger than the amount of genuinely compelling content contained within them. Several reviewers have made similar observations, particularly regarding repetitive events and progression.

This is where Unleashed 2 still has an advantage.

Those games knew exactly what they were. Race. Crash. Boost. Drift. Repeat.

Infinite Rush wants to be an open-world adventure as well as a racer, and sometimes the additional freedom feels more like padding than an essential part of the Hot Wheels experience.

Visually, the cars themselves are excellent.

The die-cast models look fantastic, and there is a wonderful sense of scale when one of these tiny machines is screaming around a huge piece of track.

The environments are colourful and packed with Hot Wheels references, although some critics have found them less impressive than the more carefully constructed environments of the Unleashed games.

The soundtrack and audio are less memorable. Nothing is particularly bad, but the game doesn’t quite have the same instantly recognisable personality in its presentation that the cars themselves provide.

The driving remains excellent, the car collection is enormous, the four vehicle classes add some genuine variety, and the open-world environments give you plenty of freedom to explore.

But I’m not completely convinced that Hot Wheels needed to become an open-world game.

The move away from the Unleashed formula brings freedom, exploration and a much larger playground, but it also loses some of the magic. Racing a tiny toy car through a giant real-world environment was one of the things that made the previous games so charming. Infinite Rush instead gives us a world designed specifically for the toys, and while that sounds perfect on paper, it isn’t quite as magical in practice.

Still, when you’re flying down an orange track, hitting a boost, launching over a jump and barely sticking the landing, all of those criticisms disappear for a moment.

That’s the Hot Wheels feeling.

And Infinite Rush still delivers it.

Verdict: 7/10